You Wanna Be Starting Something.

(forgive the subject line — I’ve been rediscovering “Thriller”. Quincy Jones is a genius.)

So the word is out. We’ve started a “THING”.

…and proven that it’s a SERIOUS thing – that it CAN work… as long as the fans care.

I’ve received a lot of messages since “Animal Mouth” came out last week. So many kind and thoughtful words, and so many listeners rising to the challenge of taking in a new song and starting a dialogue about it. I half-jokingly closed a recent blog by saying I was making “esoteric pop music for classy people”, but that’s really what this is, and there are even more classy people listening than I originally thought. Thank you for the feedback.

Most common question:

“When will the next song come out?”

This sort of gives it away that the person asking never found out what this whole “Hostage Situation” project is about… but I know not everyone reads my posts on my schedule. Essentially the answer is, “The next song will come out once enough donations have been received as to meet the ransom.”

If you understand all that already, feel free to move on. But if you’re not clear on what’s happening; if you don’t know what I mean by “Hostage Situation”, or “ransom”, or you’re not sure what the “donation” thing is about, here’s the link to the project’s main page – check it out.

The first “hostage” is free by the grace of 128 individuals who raised all the money up to May 14th. Obviously, many of them spent far more than what it would have cost them to purchase a “normal” $9.99 download from iTunes. They were the early adopters; the hardcore fans; my “Horanimals”, who believe in me and trusted that this could work. I certainly don’t expect anything more from them, and you shouldn’t either. Now it’s your turn.

There are still over THREE THOUSAND of you out there. You’re my fans; you enjoy my songs, you like my lyrics or my bass playing, you tell your friends to listen to me, you write very nice emails telling me you can’t wait for me to come back to your town and perform — I tried to weed out a bunch of email addresses that I thought were no good, and I got over two hundred messages from people saying “Don’t delete me! I wish I could hear you perform again…” So there are a lot of you just waiting for a chance to show your support.

THIS IS THAT CHANCE. The future of the music I make and of the concerts I perform all depends on your support for this project. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll back out of the whole “artist” thing and just focus on teaching.

So download the song from the Bandcamp page, and please donate when you do it; maybe a dollar for “Animal Mouth”, and maybe a few dollars for however many more songs you’d like to see this project produce. If you do, and a thousand others of similar minds do it as well, everybody wins.

Also: only one person wrote to say this, but I thought it needed mentioning:

“I think this is a great idea, and I want to help, but I’m a student and I can *really* only give like five dollars. Please don’t be offended. I think you’re awesome.”

It hit me like a ton of bricks: This person thought that they needed to apologize for “only” donating five dollars.

When I get that email from Paypal that says “You have received a payment from So-and-So”, the first thing I think isn’t “ooh! How much?” The first thing I think is, “This person is a super hero.”

So it occurred to me that people might feel awkward knowing that I can see their name right next to however much they donate to the project. As odd as it seems, I suppose it’s possible that people don’t want to “look cheap”.

Let’s put that to rest right now. On iTunes and many other music download sites, the going rate for music is about a dollar-per-song. Donating five dollars is the same as telling me you believe in me enough that you want to pre-pay for the next five songs I release.

That is *not* “cheap”. That is the action of a fan I am grateful to have. Without fans like that, I’m not a professional artist. Without fans like that, I’m not a touring artist. Without fans like that, I’m not anything worth mentioning.

If you’re a fan like that, I’m thankful for you, and I hope you continue to be as idealistic and ethical as you are.

Thank you, everyone, for reading this. I hope to release another song for you soon!